May 24, 1992

In Short

By LESLIE BRENNER

GARDEN STATE
By Rick Moody.

he "Garden State" of Rick Moody's impressive first novel
is a bleak landscape of hydroelectric plants, dilapidated
factories, industrial waste, fiery smokestacks and
disintegrated families, a place where a driverless
"European performance automobile" spontaneously accelerates
into traffic, disaffected kids in their 20's who still live
at home begin drinking at noon, teen-agers self-immolate on
the interstate and partygoers get their heads blown off
tapping kegs. Mr. Moody gives us two months in the life of
Haledon, N.J., where freight trains run through "like blood
cells, carrying unpronounceable compounds and toxins. They
rumbled past the accidents at crossing gates, past the
crime scenes and late-night waste burials." The action
focuses on a collection of dissolute young people who pass
the time playing (or not playing) in rock bands we suspect
aren't very good, drinking in seedy bars and doing drugs.
They aspire not to any particular career, but merely to
wanting a job; the city across the Hudson looms large, yet
it's practically invisible to them. Stunningly depressing,
"Garden State" may be the least romantic novel I've ever
read. One fears that Mr. Moody, a keen social observer,
intends Haledon to stand for Anytown, U.S.A. -- and, worse,
that this could be true. Yet somehow, amazingly enough, one
senses hope buried amid the despair. "Garden State," which
won Pushcart Press's 10th annual Editors' Book Award, given
for an unpublished work of fiction, is an auspicious debut
for a writer who, unlike his characters, can surely look
forward to a rosy future.